The inventors hereof have recognized that, in controlled-environment facilities, it is critical for authorities to be able to control and record information related to the various interactions, communications, and/or transactions involving the facilities' residents. For example, in a correctional facility (e.g., a prison or jail), such information may be collected and used for investigative purposes with respect to past, present, and future criminal activities. Accordingly, various exchanges of information, communication, money, goods, etc. may be recorded and stored in one or more electronic databases.
As the inventors hereof have also discovered, however, each facility typically controls its own information database, which is generally not accessible by other facilities. Therefore, even when an investigator has access to two or more such databases (e.g., each database controlled by a different facility), the investigator must still submit separate queries to, and receive separate reports from, each individual database. Consequently, information that would otherwise likely be correlated had the databases been consolidated or shared across the facilities for investigative purposes may remain undetected. To address these and other issues identified by the inventors hereof, the following community-based investigative tools are disclosed.